Scientific and Cultural Cooperation between the Eastern Bloc and Southeast Asia, 1950s-1980s

Type

Single Panel

Schedule

Session 3
Tue 15:00-16:30 Sala de Comisiones

Convener

Barbora Nováková Charles University

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Papers

Heterogeneous Socialisms: Lao Students in the USSR and the Ideas They Brought Home Michael Robert Dunford National University of Singapore
When socialist revolutionaries took control of Laos in 1975, the Soviet Union inaugurated an unprecedented program of tertiary educational assistance, sending thousands of Lao students to universities across the USSR through the late 1980s. Among them were students enrolled specifically in the humanities and social sciences, disciplines in which Marxist-Leninist ideology still played an active institutional role through the late socialist period. This paper draws on oral history interviews with program graduates to examine how Lao students encountered, absorbed, and reproduced socialist ideology during their years abroad and after they returned home. The central finding is that ideology, far from functioning as a unified transmission between socialist states, came to Lao students in heterogeneous and often contradictory forms. Drawing on Žižek’s model of ideological “quilting” and Yurchak’s notion of being “vnye* (“outside”), the paper argues that what graduates brought home was not a singular “Soviet socialism” but a range of competing and sometimes irreconcilable interpretations of Marxist-Leninist thought, shaped by the particular institutions, republics, and historical moments in which they studied. The program’s ideological legacy in contemporary Laos is thus best understood not as a coherent transfer of doctrine, but as the introduction of productive ideological plurality into the contemporary political culture of the Lao PDR.
Hospital, Solidarity, Socialism: The Story of Bệnh viện Tiệp Khắc in Hai Phong Marta Lopatkova Charles University
This paper explores the history of the Czechoslovak Hospital (Bệnh viện Tiệp Khắc) in Haiphong—today the Việt Tiệp Friendship Hospital (Bệnh viện Hữu Nghị Việt Tiệp)—as a prism through which to examine socialist internationalism in practice. Established in the aftermath of the Geneva Accords, the hospital became one of the most visible manifestations of Czechoslovak support for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Negotiations over this assistance began in June 1956, prompted both by a request from the Vietnamese government and by a six-week survey mission of Czechoslovak medical experts, who recommended completing an unfinished hospital in Haiphong. Once the project was approved, Czechoslovakia took responsibility for its funding, technical realization, equipment, and personnel, underscoring the depth of the bilateral commitment.
From 1957 onward, Czechoslovak doctors and nurses travelled to Vietnam, where they lived and worked for several years. Their experiences of an unfamiliar and often challenging environment shaped not only the functioning of the hospital itself, but also the memories and life trajectories of those involved.
Based on archival research and oral history interviews, the paper reconstructs the institutional history of the hospital and situates it within broader debates on socialist solidarity, medical aid, and Cold War entanglements. It argues that the hospital functioned simultaneously as a healthcare institution, a diplomatic project, and a lived arena of transnational encounter, revealing how fraternal cooperation was both materially constructed and personally experienced.
Vietnamese Communist Propaganda Imagery as a Tool of Cultural Diplomacy: The Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Eastern Bloc Jade Thau IrAsia, Aix Marseille Université
After more than a century of French colonial rule, the Việt Minh—a nationalist movement founded by the Indochinese Communist Party—seized power in August 1945. On 2 September of the same year, Hồ Chí Minh proclaimed Vietnam’s independence in Ba Đình Square. Supported by the communist bloc, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam first engaged in a war of decolonization (1945–1954), and subsequently in the Cold War (1964–1975), which manifested domestically as a protracted civil conflict.
From 1945 onward, communist propaganda imagery developed in parallel with the political discourse of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. This emerging artistic practice provides a particularly fruitful lens through which to examine cultural exchanges between Vietnam and the countries of the Eastern Bloc. During the 1960s, approximately one third of Vietnamese art students were sent to Eastern Europe to further their training, contributing to the circulation of artistic models and techniques. Between 1956 and 1984, Vietnam participated in at least 32 international exhibitions, in which propaganda imagery accounted for roughly half of the works displayed. These events were attended by artists affiliated with the Vietnam Fine Arts Association, for whom such travels created opportunities to visit cultural institutions, establish professional networks, receive awards, and circulate their works beyond national borders.
Drawing on a corpus of 1,125 propaganda images and the documented trajectories of 333 artists, this paper examines the evolution of cultural exchanges between Vietnam and Eastern Bloc countries from 1954 to 1986. It seeks to identify the principal partner countries involved in these exchanges, to analyze their political and artistic objectives, and to assess their impact on artistic practices in Vietnam within a transnational socialist framework.
On the need of reciprocity: artistic exchanges between Poland and Vietnam 1954-2025 Hubert Gromny Nicolaus Copernicus University
The Vietnamese diaspora represents the largest non-European minority in Poland, its history reflects shifts in social attitudes and policies both domestically and internationally. The exchange between Poland and Vietnam began in the 1950s, influencing academic, artistic, literary, musical, culinary, popular and scientific cultures, fostering enduring ties between the two societies that continues despite limitation of collaboration between state institutions in 2002.
The presentation will focus on modalities of representation of Vietnamese-Polish contacts in the sphere of artistic and literary practices from 1954 until today. Retrieving sources gathered in Polish libraries the presentation will discuss engagements of Polish artists and writers such as Aleksander Kobzdej’s visual reportage “Drawings from Vietnam” (1954), Halina Krzywdzianka’s literary reportage “Girls from Bến Hải” (1970), as well as projects presenting Vietnamese art in Poland such as an exhibition “Contemporary Art from Socialist Republic of Vietnam” that took place in BWA Wrocław in 1977. This single exhibition presented 144 artworks by Vietnamese artists such as Hứa Tử Hoài, Trần Nguyên Đán and Nguyễn Thị Hiền among others. In its last part the presentation will touch upon contemporary conditions of cultural exchange between Poland and Vietnam referring to a recent exhibition of Nguyễn Quốc Thành and Nhà Sàn Collective in Łódź Museum in 2025.
By presenting the narrative spanning from the 1950s until today the presentation aims to delineate key historical moments that have been conditioning cultural exchange between Polish and Vietnamese societies and pose the question on the possibilities for restoration and further fostering cooperation within the current ecology of cultural institutions in Poland and the broader region of Eastern Europe. The presentation will conclude with the proposal of reciprocity as a guiding concept for inter-cultural research as a response to a recent interest in historical expressions of solidarity between Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.
Building Socialist Cooperation: Laos-Soviet Union relations through French Diplomatic Observations, 1975-1977 Cathy Monarque University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry
Following the proclamation of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic in december 1975, one of the new regime’s main objectives was to re-establish itself on the international stage. To this end, from 1976 onwards, its representatives undertook a series of official visits to the USSR, China, Vietnam, East Germany and North Korea and developing close ties with the Soviet Union became central to the country’s new international position. This paper examines the relations and cooperations that developed between Laos and the Soviet Union from 1975 to 1977, focusing on its actors and concrete methods. To this end, the diplomatic archives of French embassies in Vientiane and Moscow provide a unique perspective on the gap between socialist rhetoric and daily practice, compensating for the lack of accessible Lao and Russian archives. The analysis first addresses how Soviet engagement combined socialist internationalism with strategic concerns regarding the Sino-Soviet rivalry. It then explores institutional cooperation, tracing how different models were adapted or resisted locally. These field realities reveal the frictions that occurred when Soviet frameworks met Lao administrative and infrastructure limits, against the backdrop of Laos’s ongoing state-building process.
Creating Socialist Expertise: The Institutionalization of Vietnamese Studies in Czechoslovakia in the Early 1960s Barbora Nováková Charles University
This paper examines the establishment of Vietnamese Studies in Czechoslovakia in the early 1960s as a case of socialist knowledge production shaped by Cold War internationalism and the deepening relationship between Czechoslovakia and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Rather than treating the emergence of the field as a purely academic development, the paper approaches it as part of a broader nexus of scientific, cultural, and political cooperation between the Eastern Bloc and Southeast Asia.
It asks why Vietnamese Studies was institutionalized at this particular moment, which institutions and individuals were involved in its creation, and how the new field was justified within the framework of socialist internationalism, educational exchange, and the growing demand for regional expertise. By focusing on the early phase of the discipline’s formation, the paper explores how academic knowledge about Vietnam was linked to state priorities, international solidarity, and the practical needs of expanding bilateral relations.
More broadly, the paper argues that the founding of Vietnamese Studies reveals how area expertise in socialist Czechoslovakia emerged at the intersection of scholarship, ideology, and foreign-policy interests, and thus offers a useful perspective on the mechanisms of East–South cooperation beyond diplomacy alone.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

In the post-WWII era, Central and Eastern Europe became the socialist Eastern Bloc, while decolonizing Southeast Asia was cast as the “Third World.” The Cold War nevertheless drew these once-distant regions into multi-layered cooperation. This panel examines scientific and cultural cooperation spanning exhibitions and film circulation, artist tours and residencies, scholarships and vocational training, labor/apprenticeship programs, and expert missions tied to industrialization and infrastructure in Southeast Asia.
Building on Global/New Cold War History and viewing socialist states as nodes in East–South circulatory networks (Westad 2005; Smith 2000; Slobodian 2015), we read exchange sites—exhibitions, student programs, expert missions—as arenas where official internationalism met everyday practice, revealing frictions, negotiations, and plural “socialisms.”
We aim to address primarily:

Goals & logics: What motivated cooperation, and how did aims shift from the 1950s to the 1980s?
Channels & actors: In which domains did cooperation occur, through what mechanisms, and which institutions/individuals initiated and coordinated it?
Perceptions & distinctiveness: How was cooperation perceived and represented, what frictions emerged, and to what extent did exchanges follow broader East–South patterns versus country-specific paths?